Melissa Walsh Innes, Deputy Director, Recycling Reinvented

Recycling Reinvented has recently completed a cost-benefit analysis study to provide stakeholders with a data-driven, fact-based appraisal of the potential benefits and costs of a uniquely American Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) recovery system for household packaging and printed paper (PPP).

This SWANA Webinar will present the results of this study, including:

• How the model program was designed and reviewed
• What best practices were included (and which ones were not)
• What recycling results are possible
• How much will it cost, and
• What about stranded assets?

The main conclusion of the study is that the modeled EPR system in Minnesota could increase substantially the recycling of consumer packaging and paper at about the same cost to consumers that they are paying now.

This suggests that a market-based producer responsibility model could help raise our nation's recycling rates of consumer packaging by improving collection of household recyclables while also addressing the private sector's growing demand for post-consumer raw material for manufacturing.